This page highlights some ways to integrate another author's work into your own papers, but viisit the CSM Library's MLA Guide for a complete rundown of MLA citations, in-text citations and Works Cited.
Once you have collected the sources for your paper, you want to make sure that you incorporate them into your own work ethically, meaning that you give credit to the writers you are referencing. Below are three ways to incorporate sources into your own works.
Direct quotes are portions of a text taken word for word and placed inside of a work. Readers know when an author is using a direct quote because it is denoted by the use of quotation marks and an in-text citation.
Example:
In his seminal work, David Bartholomae argues that “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion…”(4).
Be sure to be careful when quoting directly because failing to write the text exactly as it appears in the original text is not an ethical use of direct quotes. Also, failing to bracket the quote with quotation marks and/or citing it inside the text is also unethical and both mistakes are a form of plagiarism.
While quoting may be the first thing that many people think of when they think about integrating sources, paraphrasing, summarizing, and citing data are also ways to incorporate information from outside materials into your essays or projects.
A signal phrase is a device used to smoothly integrate quotations and paraphrases into your essay. It is important to use signal phrases to clearly attribute supporting evidence to its author or authors and to avoid interrupting the flow of an essay. Signal phrases can also be used as meaningful transitions, moving your readers between your ideas and those of your sources, and may also include information explaining an author’s credentials and/or affiliations as well as the title and/or publisher of the source text.
In many instances, signal phrases will contain only the last name of the author of the source text (as opposed to the author’s first and last name). For instance, in MLA papers, if you are referring to an author for the first time in your essay, you should include that author’s first name as well as the author’s relevant credentials or affiliations in your signal phrase (you might also want to include the title of the source text). Once you have supplied an author’s first name and credentials, any subsequent signal phrase referencing that same author should contain the author’s last name only.
For example:
Notice how each signal phrase verb is followed by the word “that” or a comma, which is then followed by one space before the opening quotation mark.